


Big Brother Instinct

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Gen, Kid Fic, Protective Siblings, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-10 09:57:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20526131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Ward is six years old because of magical shenanigans, and Danny's going to be a good big brother if it kills him.





	Big Brother Instinct

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirty_diana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirty_diana/gifts).

Ward was an adorable kid, tiny and big-eyed, with dark hair that had a tendency to stick up. He'd also decided Danny was a kidnapper and right now was refusing to come out of the bathroom.

"Ward," Danny said, sitting with his back against the door. "Ward, c'mon."

"Go away!"

Danny sighed and leaned his head back against the door and hoped he could talk Ward out of the bathroom before Colleen called back to update him on the cursed-artifact hunt she and Misty were currently on. He didn't want to have to admit that the five-year-old he was babysitting had locked himself in the bathroom and Danny couldn't get him to come out.

He hadn't realized that taking care of little kids was something he was woefully unprepared for. He'd never been the older child, and apparently, _being_ a little kid wasn't great preparation for babysitting one.

But mostly, he hadn't counted on the fact that Ward wouldn't recognize him. Ward had been unconscious ever since this had happened to him, and after Danny had brought him to the dojo and had a panicked conference with Misty and Colleen, they'd gone out in search of the antiquities smuggler Ward had been helping Danny track down, and Danny was ... well ...

_I want to help,_ he'd told Colleen, _but I also need to -- if something happens --_

_You need to be here,_ she'd said. _I get it._

About an hour after they left, just as Danny was starting to get really worried, Ward woke up. He woke up disoriented, wearing one of Colleen's smallest T-shirts and boxers they'd safety-pinned in place that were more like short pants on him. Danny brought him a drink of water, and that was when things started going wrong -- Ward didn't know Danny, he didn't know where he was, he wanted his parents, and he was getting increasingly upset. Everything Danny tried to do to calm him down (which was, essentially, being as honest about his situation as possible) just made him more upset.

So now he was locked in the bathroom. Danny heard occasional little sniffles and scuffles, and wondered what the heck he was doing in there.

"Ward?"

"Go away! My dad is going to send _lawyers_ after you!"

_Don't laugh,_ Danny told himself sternly. _Definitely don't laugh._

He tried to figure out what Ward's home situation would have been at this point. Ward looked about five or six. He hadn't asked for his mom, only his dad. His mom had died when Joy was a very small baby, so this was probably -- what, a year or so later than that? Maybe Ward was more like seven. Okay, Danny could probably add estimating small children's ages to the list of things he wasn't good at.

Dammit, he got along _great_ with kids, most of the time. Ward (adult Ward) even used to complain about it, on their road trip -- they always had crowds of small children following them everywhere. Danny wasn't even sure exactly what he did that seemed to charm little kids. He just liked them! And they liked him! He gave them candy and did magic tricks for them and showed them how to make flower crowns, and they laughed at his funny clothes and weird accent, and followed him around.

It just figured that Ward was the one kid he couldn't manage to win over. Of course, that had been true when they actually _were_ kids, too.

"Hey, Ward," he said through the door. "Would you like some ice cream? I think we have some." It was green tea flavored, which adult Ward had hated, but ... maybe kids weren't as picky? Or something. Anyway, Ward wasn't answering, so that didn't work. 

There was a loud clunk from the bathroom, as of something falling over.

Hmm. The problem was, he could get in easily if he wanted to. If he couldn't open the door by sheer force, he could always Iron Fist through it. But that was the absolute last thing he wanted to do. He'd seen the way Ward was looking at him before fleeing into the bathroom: _scared._

He had spent his whole childhood being smaller than Ward, and a little bit scared of him, and it was thoroughly weird to wrap his head around the idea that right now, from Ward's perspective, he was the big scary adult. But he was, and Ward had grown up in a household ruled by an adult who enforced his will through physical intimidation. Of _course_ Ward was scared of him. Breaking into the bathroom would just destroy any chance he had of forging some kind of tentative bond of trust.

"Hey, Ward? Do you want to see some pictures of Joy?"

He was thinking Ward would like to see pictures of his sister all grown up. He'd been completely up front with Ward from the beginning that it was 25 years later than what Ward remembered, which in retrospect had probably been part of the problem.

However, it worked. The door opened so suddenly that Danny almost fell over backwards, and a furious six-year-old piled onto him, kicking and biting.

"Ack!" Danny quickly discovered that pinning down a small child was no easy task. He very profoundly did not want to hurt Ward, or scare him (more). Eventually he found that it worked to hold Ward out at arm's length. "Stop it! What's wrong?"

"Let my sister alone! Give her back!"

"Whoa! No! Ward!" Shocked, Danny let go of him. Ward punched him with surprisingly hard little fists. Danny blocked him absently, through sheer reflex. "No, no, Joy's fine! She's not with me. She's all grown up, Ward. Remember, I told you she's a grown-up now? Just like you normally are."

He reached for Ward, meaning to hug him or pat him or somehow calm him down, but Ward flinched away and fled behind the bed.

Danny leaned back against the wall and rubbed his hands over his face. Either he was absolutely _terrible_ at this, or dealing with Ward was parenting on hard mode.

But it was that stubbornness, that core-deep refusal to give in, that had allowed him to survive all those years of Harold. Danny knew Ward didn't think of himself this way, but he was tough; he had to be.

And that wasn't something Danny wanted to damage in him, or make him feel bad about.

Instead he lay down on the floor and pillowed his head on his arm.

"So you're gonna be grown up again soon," he said. "Colleen and Misty are out there working hard to figure this out. Meanwhile I get to hang out with you. I think that makes me the lucky one, don't you?"

The only answer was a small rustle from behind the bed, such as a stray cat might make. 

"I'm going to take care of you, Ward," Danny said. His throat ached, because nobody _had_ taken care of Ward, had they? Not ever. The adults who were supposed to be there for him had dropped the ball, and all there had been were other little kids who never knew what was going on. "I'm going to keep you safe. I know you don't believe me, and you don't have any reason to. But it's going to be okay. I'll make sure of it."

He rolled over onto his side, facing the bed, and was startled by the sight of Ward staring back at him from under the draped bedcovers, bright eyes in the shadowed space between bed and wall. 

"Hey," Danny said, grinning at him. Ward didn't smile back, but at least he didn't scuttle out of sight. "Listen, I think I want a bowl of that ice cream, don't you? I'm sure there's enough for two."

He smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring, non-kidnappery way, and got up and went into the kitchen. At which point a variety of new problems appeared. Problem one: All the bowls they had were ceramic and pottery ones. Would those work for a little kid? Well, if Ward broke one of them, it wasn't like Danny minded. Their dishes got broken regularly in training accidents and/or ninja attacks anyway. Problem two: most of their furniture was bar stools at the kitchen counter and mismatched chairs that were probably too tall for a six-year-old.

Maybe they could sit on the floor? Or the couch would work ...

Also, wow, this place was absolutely the _least_ childproofed place possible. Danny moved a couple of breakable ceramics onto shelves, followed by a training sword, a pair of throwing knives, and a belt of shuriken. He was in the process of moving some heavy lamps and a rack of CDs, and starting to realize that he was getting a trifle obsessive about this, when his phone rang.

"How's parenthood treating you?" Colleen asked. "No, seriously, how is he?"

"Okay, I guess. He's awake now." Danny opened the freezer, tucking the phone into the crook of his neck. "We still have ice cream, right? Oh, there it is. How's the artifact hunt going?"

"We're just staking out the place, and Misty's on a coffee run." There were some small rustles, and he pictured her leaning back in Misty's car. "So you two are getting along?"

"Uh ... sort of? He's not locked in the bathroom anymore."

Colleen choked on a laugh. "What'd you do?"

"Nothing! He thinks I'm kidnapping him. Where's the scoop for --"

"Top drawer on the left. I mean, look at it from his point of view, Danny. He's just a little kid, and here he is in a strange place with a strange adult."

"I thought he'd --" Danny had to break off. _Recognize me. Know me. Trust me._ But it sounded silly even to him, putting it that way. There was no reason why Ward _would_ know him, or believe him. In the world he came from, if he knew Danny at all, Danny would be a baby.

"Hey, listen." Colleen's voice was gentler. "Try showing him your phone. Play a game or something, or watch a video on the computer. He's going to be fascinated by all of that stuff. Keep in mind, all he remembers is the '80s, right? VCRs and GameBoys are the height of modern technology for him. He's gonna go wild for a touch screen."

"Hey. That's really helpful, Colleen. Thanks."

"I work with little kids at the center sometimes. Listen, Danny, you're gonna be fine. _He's_ gonna be fine."

"I know," Danny said, feeling a little more confident. "I think I'm starting to win him over. I mean, who doesn't love ice cream?"

"That's the spirit. Don't forget there's chocolate sauce in the fridge. and I think we still have some of the sprinkles left over from Claire's birthday party too."

"Ooh," Danny said, perking up, and just then there was a tremendous crash from the bedroom. "-- ack, never mind, gotta go, bye!"

He definitely heard Colleen laughing as he hung up the phone and bolted into the bedroom to make sure Ward hadn't knocked over a rack of katanas on himself or something.

It was obvious at first glance what had made the noise. The lamp on the bedside table was in pieces all over the floor. Ward must have tried to crawl out from under the bed and got tangled in the cord, or tried to pull himself up on it. There was absolutely no sign of him at the moment. Danny started to crouch to look for him under the bed, and realized just in time there was broken glass all over the floor. 

Broken glass. And a kid. And here he'd been worried about the throwing stars ...

"Ward!"

He looked under the bed, didn't find him, stepped on glass going back to the bathroom, hopped on one foot and tried to channel his inner calm. Ward wasn't in the bathroom either. Danny limped back to the bedroom, and this time heard little rustles from the closet, like there were mice in there.

"Ward?"

He opened the closet door and Ward retreated, covering his head with his arms. Danny just stood there and stared at him, a cascade of unpleasant realizations crashing down on him. Ward expected to be _hit._

And how normal was it, really, for a little kid to be _that_ scared of strange adults? Most of the kids Danny had met had been shy but friendly. Danny had just assumed it was waking up in a strange place with no one around except an adult he'd never seen before. And probably that was part of it. But this wasn't a kid who'd been led to expect the best from strange adults.

Danny sat down in the closet doorway, and then edged to the side so Ward wouldn't feel blocked in. Ward continued to cower in a corner, and Danny looked at him and _hurt_ and wished it was possible to resurrect Harold just to get an opportunity to punch his teeth through his spine.

"Is this because you broke the lamp?" he asked, keeping his voice as gentle as possible. "It's okay. I'm not mad. I know you didn't mean to."

There was a sad little sniffle from deep in the closet, and every last bit of Danny's heart shattered into a thousand pieces. He leaned his head back against the doorframe. _Calm. Calm. Ommmmmm ...._

Technology, Colleen had said. Maybe a distraction would work.

"Hey. I was going to show you Joy. Would you like to see your sister all grown up?"

He sat forward, discovered that his foot was bleeding and tucked it under the other one, and got out his phone. His gallery was huge, and most of the pictures were tourist photos that he'd taken over the last year or so, along with a bunch of pictures of his friends, many of them crooked or blurry. Ward used to complain that Danny was a terrible photographer, but it wasn't like Ward used to take a lot of pictures _himself_ \--

Used to take. Would take again. Danny swallowed another lump in his throat and flicked past a photo of Ward looking at him with an exasperated expression over cups of tea on an outdoor terrace somewhere. Then something brushed his elbow and he jumped.

Ward, very quietly, had crept to the door of the closet and was now kneeling next to him, looking at the photos past Danny's arm. He flinched away again, and looked up, wide-eyed. There were tear tracks on his face.

"Hey there," Danny said gently, smiling at him. He lay the phone down on the floor between them, and paged back. "I'm still trying to find some of Joy. I don't have very many pictures of her. But that's grown-up you. Maybe I can find some of you and me together. I took a bunch of selfies to send home, but they're kind of buried in all the recent ones." For a short while, dragging Ward into shared selfies had been too much fun to resist, until he managed to get through all of Ward's different shades of bored and annoyed expressions, and got tired of teasing him.

He couldn't find any of the two of them together, but he did find a picture of himself, not a selfie but a picture Ward had taken with Danny's camera. Danny had just folded a little tiny row of paper animals and was grinning up at the camera with his chin resting on his folded hands and the paper menagerie lined up in front of him. The next one was Ward holding a lopsided little folded-paper crane, wearing the usual long-suffering look that he got when Danny tried to photograph him.

"I was showing grownup-you how to do _zhezhi_ \-- that's folded paper art. It was late at night and we couldn't sleep." Because they'd both woke up from nightmares, but that was something he didn't need to talk to the kid about, let alone the content of those nightmares. "I could show you too. Here." He nudged the phone toward Ward and demonstrated how to swipe forward. "Go ahead and look at these. I'll go get some paper and, uh, get our ice cream. And pick the glass out of my feet. _Stay here,_ okay?"

He limped off and got a broom to corral the glass in a corner of the bedroom, and put an upside-down wastebasket over it until he got around to vacuuming it up. By the time he was done with that and getting the glass out of his foot (which had mostly healed by that point anyway), he remembered that, oh shit, the ice cream was out on the counter, wasn't it?

It was. It now consisted of two bowls full of syrupy pale-green goo.

_Too bad there's not a microwave for cold,_ Danny thought, staring at it, and then he thought, hmmm, maybe he actually _did_ have a solution for that. He wrapped his Iron Fist hand around one of the bowls. He had to grin a little; he still wasn't over the sheer delight of having it back. He knew that he could channel his chi to keep himself warm, and to help warm up other people, and he even occasionally used it to heat up Colleen's tea, so from what he understood of how refrigerators worked, he ought to be able to use the same principle in reverse, right? Just draw the heat over _here,_ and that ought to make cold happen over _there_ \--

The bowl shattered in his grasp, or rather, exploded. He was left holding a handful of ice-cold pottery shards and dripping green goop.

Oh ... kay. The Iron Fist was not a microwave for making things colder. Check.

"It did work, though," he said out loud, pleased with himself, and heard a giggle from the doorway.

He looked up quickly to see kid-Ward standing there, clutching the phone. Ward held it up in front of his face and all right, _that_ was the shy-kid thing that Danny had been sort of subconsciously expecting. Not hiding in the bathroom and threatening to call lawyers.

"Hey, look, I just broke something too," Danny said, holding up a handful of broken piece of bowl, dripping ice cream, and, uh, blood. Oops. "See, I made an even bigger mess than you did."

Ward peeked around the phone, and frowned. "Did you hurt yourself?"

"Only a little," Danny said quickly. He ran cold water over his hand in the sink. The cuts weren't too bad; they'd already stopped bleeding. "Did you find pictures of Joy?"

"I ... um." Ward pressed the phone to his chest. "I don't know."

"Oh .... right. You don't know what she looks like. Yeah?"

"Yeah," Ward said.

"Listen, go find somewhere to sit and I'll bring this over, okay?"

He meant something like the couch, but Ward crawled up on one of the bar stools. He had no trouble getting up, so maybe they weren't too tall after all. "What's _that?"_ Ward asked skeptically, staring at the surviving bowl.

"Ice cream."

"It's _green."_

"It's green tea flavored."

Ward wrinkled his nose.

"Yeah, adult you didn't like it anyway. You know what? This was a bad idea." Danny dumped the other bowl into the sink. "Let's get something else."

He found a package of cookies, also green tea flavored, and some leftover Halloween candy. Ward hesitantly munched one of the cookies, announced that it was weird, and glommed onto a handful of mini Twix and Snickers bars.

Danny flattened out one of the wrappers. "Do you have a favorite animal?"

There was a long pause before Ward mumbled around a mouthful of Snickers bar, "Dinosaur," and then stuffed the rest of it into his mouth.

"Good choice. I like them too." And he was caught off guard, just then, by a sudden memory out of the past: toy dinosaurs on the steps of their townhouse, carefully setting them up along the edges of the steps and underneath the green leaves of the shrubbery like they were in a jungle. Danny used to have a full set of all the different kinds of dinosaurs, he remembered that part, and he also remembered Ward stealing a handful of them and throwing them over the fence into the neighboring yard where he couldn't get to them.

But what he'd forgotten until now was that Ward had been into it too. Ward even had dinosaur sheets on his bed at some point when they were kids. It occurred to Danny that maybe the whole reason why he'd been so interested in dinosaurs was because he'd picked it up from Ward, and maybe part of why Ward had been so much of a dick about it -- well, aside from Ward being a dick about almost everything back then -- was because he felt like he was too old for it and he was jealous of Danny's toys.

Or maybe Harold had made him stop.

"I don't know how to make dinosaurs," he told Ward. "They're not really in the traditional folded-paper skill set. But I bet I could figure one out. It's probably a little bit like a tiger, and I know how to make one of those."

It turned out that dinosaurs were not actually that much like tigers, but it made Ward grin another of those shy little grins (now chocolate-smeared) as Danny tried to figure out how to fold long necks and curving, spiky backs. Doing it on the countertop with mini chocolate bar wrappers was too hard, so he grabbed a notepad they used for shopping lists and went and sat on the floor in front of the couch, making an entire ... herd? flock? of misshapen dinosaurs and setting them out on the floor. By now Ward was snuggled up against his side, tiny and trusting, watching wide-eyed and fascinated as Danny folded each new animal.

"Here. You can help me make a pterodactyl. I bet we can use the basic crane folds for this."

He carefully guided Ward's small hands on the paper, helping him through each fold. When it was done, Ward giggled and held it up, and Danny was struck suddenly by the open joy on his face, and the difference between that and adult Ward holding his little folded crane, diffident and cynical and a little bit embarrassed about it, but with some of the same shy pleasure underneath.

"Hang on, I think I should take a picture of this." He took a quick photo of Ward with the crane cupped carefully in his child-sized hands. Something to bookend the other photo, maybe. A snapshot of time passing, and what 25 years of Harold had done, and what it hadn't managed to do.

Ward looked up from the dinosaur, and said, with signs of a scowl starting to return, "Where's my dad?"

Danny gathered himself for an accurate explanation, then gave up. "Away."

"Where?"

"Just away. He'll come back." Which he would, in some sense -- those 25 awful years that Ward had forgotten, all coming back to him at once. "Listen, you should eat something other than chocolate. Want me to make us some ramen?"

They ate their bowls of ramen sitting on the floor in a pile of blankets and throws from the couch. Danny showed Ward how to use chopsticks, or tried to, while Ward giggled and dropped noodles in his lap. After that, Ward played with the dinosaur menagerie a bit, and then seemed to lose interest. Danny found a cartoon on his phone and watched it with him, and Ward drooped sleepily on him and then eventually fell asleep, half in and half out of his lap.

His phone vibrated with a text from Colleen. _How's it going?_

Danny texted her the picture of Ward with the dinosaurs.

He got back a heart-eyes emoji, followed by: _That was Misty. She says her heart just grew three sizes. Think what good blackmail material it'll be when he's normal again, too._

Danny leaned back against the couch and grinned. _Any luck on the artifact hunt?_

_Not yet. Need someone to spell you on the babysitting?_

Danny looked down at Ward's little tousled dark head, and pulled a fold of the afghan over both of them. They were going to get Ward back to normal; he refused to think otherwise. But if they didn't ... he was fiercely determined to do what Ward's parents, and even his own parents, hadn't done, and give Ward an opportunity to grow up safe and protected and loved.

_No,_ he texted back. _We're doing fine._


End file.
